About this item
* Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction* Nominated for a 2013 Edgar Award * Book of the Year (Non-fiction, 2012) The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor. In 1949, Floridas orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By days end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys." . And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," and the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the "Florida Terror" at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshalls NAACP associates involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual threats that he would be next. . Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBIs unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACPs Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as "one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.
About the Author
Gilbert King is the author of Beneath a Ruthless Sun, published by Riverhead Books in 2018. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Devil in the Grove, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 2013. The book was also the runner-up in nonfiction for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a finalist for both the Chautauqua Prize and the Edgar Award, and the gold medal winner in nonfiction for the Florida Book Awards. King has written about the race and criminal justice for the New York Times and the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian. He's also a featured contributor to The Marshall Project. King's previous book, The Execution of Willie Francis was published in 2008. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. For more information, please go to www.GilbertKing.com
